I was drawn to the paper that I read for this post because of its comparative nature. The focus being whether ELL students had better results by working with partners, or working with technology. Since both of these ideas are usually viewed positively by educators, I was curious if there would be hard data that suggested that one of them was intrinsically better than the other.
The author does a great job at setting the stage not only for his paper’s focus, but for the plight of ELL students in general. I feel like it transcends normal research papers and almost serves as a narrative of some systemic problems that ELL programs face. He outlines the difficulties that both ELL students face, and the concerns of teachers who are struggling to adapt to an increasing amount of ELL students in their classrooms. He also details some potential strategies that could be utilized to solve some of the issues he raises.
The bulk of the data provided is more qualitative than quantitative. The students involved were given a number of surveys asking questions about whether they liked the learning strategy they used or what the best way to learn for them was. Some of the responses I think do provide some valuable insight into what could be an effective strategy for these students, but given that these are 9th graders being surveyed, not all of the feedback is helpful. A favorite response of mine to the prompt “List up to 3 ways your teacher could have helped you MORE than he did” included “Not being rude”. The only real quantitative data provided was the score differences between a pretest and post test that both groups took, and it is revealed that the technology group scored slightly higher than the partner group.
I must admit, I was disappointed when it came to the actual study of the paper. The subjects of his research were two groups of two students. I’m not sure that’s a big enough test size to get any meaningful data from. With such a small amount, there could be any number of reasons for deviations or personal preferences that would be outliers in a larger study. The author does note my concerns in his “Threats to Validity” section, along with detailing how the research took place during the COVID pandemic so students were using virtual and hybrid scheduling as well. I understand after reading that the research was completed as a class project and probably is not intended for mass publishing, but I was intrigued by the title and was hoping for a more robust study.
While the findings were personally a let down, it did give me some ideas that I think could potentially be used in the classroom. This class has been focused on ESL technology and this paper did not give me much new insight since most of the ideas (Kahoot, podcasts, etc.) had already been discussed in our class. But the idea of an ESL partner program was something I had not considered. I think there could be real value of placing volunteer students with ELL students. Maybe you could pair together a student learning Spanish, with an ELL student who is a native Spanish speaker. They would both be able to learn from each other and I think it would be very beneficial to help ELL students acclimate to a new school. Thinking about that made me sort of reevaluate the entire concept of the paper for myself. Why pit technology and partners against each other? Why not use both in conjunction with one another? There’s nothing stopping teachers from having structured pairs of students using technology together to learn. I think that both strategies have value and the best thing teachers can do is find which of these strategies works best for their individual students.
Citation:
Freeze, T. (2021, April). A Quasi-Experimental Study of the use of Structured-Pairing and Technology to Help English Language Learners Achieve at the Same Level As Their English-Speaking Peers. Retrieved from https://mdsoar.org/bitstream/handle/11603/21532/Freeze%20Final%203%20Reviewed_Vickery_051321-converted%20%283%29.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
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